The right to education in one’s own comfort zone is a fundamental and inalienable human right that should be available to all people irrespective of their ethnicity or religious background. Schools do not belong to state, they belong to parents. It is the parents’ choice to have faith schools for their children. Bilingual Muslim children need state funded Muslim schools with bilingual Muslim teachers as role models during their developmental periods. There is no place for a non-Muslim teacher or a child in a Muslim school. There are hundreds of state schools where Muslim children are in majority. In my opinion, all such schools may be designated as Muslim community schools. An ICM Poll of British Muslims showed that nearly half wanted their children to attend Muslim schools. There are only 143 Muslim schools. A state funded Muslim school in Birmingham has 220 pupils and more than 1000 applicants chasing just 60.

Majority of anti-Muslim stories are not about terrorism but about Muslim culture–the hijab, Muslim schools, family life and religiosity. Muslims in the west ought to be recognised as a western community, not as an alien culture.
Iftikhar Ahmad
http://www.londonschoolofislamics.org.uk

The professions, and thus the places where professional people live, now contain any number of people originally from Scotland, the North, the Midlands and the less salubrious parts of the South, with working-class grandparents or even parents, and with Irish great-grandparents.

Where will it all end?

This issue of evolution is a complex one in this regard. As part of the national curriculum it is of course taught in many such schools.

Many of those schools will then give the students a complimentary or in some cases an alternative view on the subject.

In any regard, there is no one view as to Judaism’s view on evolution, and by and large the issue is not one of dogma.

Well, it has been nice chatting with you. Thanks for taking the time, and stick around.

As you are fond of anecdotal examples I’ll give you one of mine. My daughter goes to an all girls school. She and a couple of her classmates were selected to represent the school in a local enterprise event. There were about 25 schools at there; a couple of all girls schools, some all boys schools with the majority being mixed. Each school had to make a presentation about their business idea and answer questions on it. Without exception at the mixed schools the presentations were led by a boy, the majority of the questions were answered by boys and in general girls had small, insignificant parts. This was so marked that a teacher at the table I was sitting at commented on it. This in and of itself proves nothing but it reinforces my belief that a lot of girls (not all by any means) flourish more and become more confident people in a single sex environment.

The irony is that, with hindsight, my daughter would probably have been better off at a mixed sex school.

Bullying of course happens in all types of schools. I have no idea if it happens more in single sex schools.

I agree that this type of education is not just interesting, but highly important, only to a very small number of Jews, and I have not advocated this for the entire country, and neither have I claimed that this is what goes on in faith schools up and down the country.

Your account of the very successful ex-Hasids, is I’m sure not an isolated case. And may I stress such education is not restricted to Hassidic children (who in any case tend to be taught in Yiddish), but can be found in non-hassidic orthodox schools too.

Different people require different things. I love the difference manifested in this great country of ours, and I have no problem at all, with our government assisting different people to educate their children in they way that they feel they require, (however odd or arcane it might seem to others :-)

There is not much more I can add to this debate, but I hope that I have been successful in explaining my point.